site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

33
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As far as we know, the way the brain works is actually stacking all those parts on top of each other and they are all important.

There are multiple forms of Dyslexia but they all stem from a difficulty or inability to have the brain recognize a certain level of abstraction of this process. For instance being unable to map letters to syllables and then to sounds and having to do the harder task of mapping letter sequences directly to those.

I don't recall if phonics or the neurology that vindicates it came first. But given this knowledge all the holistic methods are doing really is betting on the kids figuring out those separate skills on their own.

Given the stated goals of the "vibes" this is quite ironic.

Yep. And for the stacking to work effectively you ought to master the constituent parts. We find this in other domains too; good luck solving a complex math problem when you don’t have mastery over the smaller sub-problems. Good luck learning a piano piece without working out the left hand and right hand alone, or not knowing how to sightread. Even things like driving require mastery over a bunch of small parts. Just placing a kid in a car and saying good luck is going to get him into an accident.

It’s good to remember that reading is a totally unnatural human activity. A human has built-in instincts for learning to walk and speak. But writing and reading is as artificial as unicycling while playing the violin. So it needs to be trained.

Artificial except for those lucky rare of us with hyperlexia. I don’t remember learning how to read, because it happened before the age of childhood amnesia. Reading, writing, and computer programming come as naturally to me as swimming to a duck.